Iran Just Released Classified Footage Decoded From A Captured US Drone

Iran has just
released footage that proves it has, if not literally decoded, at
least accessed some of the data stored inside the stealthy U.S.
RQ-170 drone captured in December 2011.

The video, which was aired by Iranian TV as part of an interview
with Sardar Hajizadeh, the Commander of the Islamic
Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Forces, tells how the
drone was captured and how its technology was successfully
accessed and decoded, is the first evidence Iran has found
something interesting in the unmanned aircraft’s intelligence
gathering sensors and internal hard disks.

So far, Iranian claims were never backed by evidence: some blurry
details about its activity in California and Afghanistan and some
irrelevant information; data that could be retrieved with a
little of OSINT (Open Source INTelligence) and some spying.

Now, the new video clearly shows footage recorded by the drone
underbelly camera: the area surrounding Kandahar airfield (KAF)
as the RQ-170 is about to land, a small building (possibly being
spied), a C-130 and
at least one Reaper drone
among shelters at KAF.

Nothing really special, still something that clearly shows
Iranians did find something inside the Sentinel and were able to
extract and decode it.

Hence, the drone’s internal memories still contained some useful
information and were not fully automatically erased as a
consequence of the loss of control procedure. To such an extent
data, including video recordings from the drone’s FLIR turret,
was recovered.

Noteworthy, some still images (that you can find in the longer
video here below) show the drone immediately after being
recovered in the desert and, later, moved with a helicopter sling
load.

How the “Beast of Kandahar” crash landed in Iran remains a
mystery: Tehran claims it was hacked,
but the stealth drone, undetected by any radar, might
have crash
landed for a failure somewhere in eastern Iran where it
was found (possibly by accident). And where the U.S.
could not blow it up.